Bitcoin offers privacy -- as long as you don't cash out or spend it - PCWorld #bitcoin

On the surface, Bitcoin seems to be a great way to hide cash. Actually, it’s a terrible way to launder money. That’s the conclusion of a new academic study that analyzed Bitcoin’s blockchain, or the public ledger that records bitcoin transactions. The ledger shows how bitcoins move from one person to another, represented by 34-character alphanumeric addresses. It’s a sea of numbers without names. But researchers from the University of California at San Diego and George Mason University found it is a lot harder to convert bitcoins to cash—or spend the bitcoins with a service—and stay anonymous due to the ledger. Most bitcoin users interact with a service to buy or sell the virtual currency. These days, most of those services want to know exactly who they’re dealing with, especially as regulators around the world take an increasing interest in bitcoin. It is possible to some...